When his mentor (Robert De Niro) is taken captive, a retired member of Britain's Elite Special Air Service (Jason Statham) is forced into action. His mission: kill three assassins dispatched by their cunning leader (Clive Owen).

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Jason Statham plays Danny, a paid assassin who is partnered with Hunter (De Niro). During an assassination in Mexico, Statham almost kills a young girl. He decides to retire, a decision that lasts to about a minute after the credits when he gets a message De Niro has been taken hostage.

Now for the initial strange twists:The sheik who has Hunter held hostage is the same man who hires Danny.Danny must kill British agents in order to get Hunter freed. These are "SAS" agents who are tougher than Navy SEALS, or so they say in the film.These 3 agents must confess on film to having killed the sheik's son. They are trained to resist torture.And it must look like an accident.

One last thing...they only have the identity of one of the agents. Once the first agent is killed, the SAS suspects something is up...A few plot twists, some cliche lines, and the movie is over except this movie got bogged down with twists and bad lines to the point that you can't wait for it to end. Much too long to hold my interest all the way through.

This is a typical Stratham type of action. In fact he is wears the same shades. Shooting, chase scenes, roof top jumping, explosions- you know the stuff.

I have to say I have been looking forward to seeing this film for quite a while, and I really wasn't disappointed. Starring Statham, Owen and, the very special icing on the cake, Robert De Niro, there was huge potential here for either something really good, or something truly dire (or any point in between!). Statham and De Niro are not exactly renowned for being choosy about scripts, and have both made some real turkeys as a result. But luckily here they are both on top form.

Statham is the standard Statham character. The ice cool professional man of violence, here cast as a professional killer. De Niro fills the seen it all mentor/friend role, whose kidnapping forces the Stath back into the game. Sent to hunt down and bump off three SAS men who annoyed Sheikh, he soon runs up against ex SAS man Clive Owen, and the shadowy organisation that backs him. What follows is some well staged action and thrills as Stath sets about completing his mission. The screen really comes alive when De Niro is on, and he gives a surprisingly committed performance. Clive Oven (complete with top lip caterpillar) is convincing as their opponent.

The plot is quite linear with a few holes and there are some real production errors (the film is set in the early eighties, and there are more than a few anachronisms on screen), but we can forgive all of this for the pleasure of the thrills and spills. The recreation of the eighties (ignoring the odd anachronism) is quite well done, and with all the old triumphs and MGs on display along with the odd facial hair it sometimes feels like an episode of the Professionals (no bad thing, I love that series). All it needed was for Stath to adopt a poodle perm and he could be Doyle... My one serious quibble would be that the film is a little too long, with a few scenes tacked on to the end that could have been cut, making the film a bit tighter. But apart from this, it's an excellent film. 4 stars.

Having missed this movie when it hit the cinemas, I watched Killer Elite last night at home on dvd. The fact I then made the effort to jump onto Amazon to write a review should tell you it's a decent movie straight away. If you are unfamiliar with Jason Statham movies, or just action movies in general, there are a few simple rules to adhere to in order to get maximum enjoyment from them:

1) Statham plays the "same" character in almost every single one of his movies. If you're going into a Statham movie expecting him to read Shakespeare, leave now and don't waste your 90 minutes.2) It's an action film first and everything else second. Meaning the plot will have holes (for an assassin, 'the welshman' here is less reliable than a shotgun with chocolate bullets..), there will be countless errors in realism (set in the eighties, but notice the cafe prices in Euros..) If you go into an action movie and want to review things like that then you shoudn't be watching it as you're clearly looking for ways to put it down or feel good about yourself.

Jason Statham is doing the kind of thing we, as action fans, used to appreciate from the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme. Every one of his movies is familiar to the last and the plot could be picked apart by over-analytical, self appointed critic types but the fact is we don't care. Commando (the most terrible movie of all time in terms or realism, plot holes and character development) stands as one of the greatest action movies ever made. That tells the story here. He provides great action movies on dvd regularly and this is another one. He ain't never gonna win an Oscar but this is watchable and fun for guys.

Get a pizza, watch this and have some good proper 'man film' entertainment.

Sharing a title but nothing more with one of Sam Peckinpah's very worst films, 2011's Killer Elite claims to be based on a true story that in fact turned out to be a particularly unpleasant bit of opportunism from explorer Ranulph Fiennes exploiting the deaths of family friends to sell a generic thriller novel. While Fiennes is a minor character in the film, the script reworks his story substantially and changes the focus from the intended victims (the good guys) to their killers (the bad guys). Only here the killers aren't all bad guys and their victims are all scumbags to try to take some of the sting out of their deaths, which happen offscreen just to soften the blow still further. That's not the only change: rather than a group of Arab communist assassins targeting serving SAS officers over a period of 17 years in revenge for the death of a powerful Sheik's sons in the war in Oman while a shadowy group of ex-SAS vigilantes try to stop them, now we have Jason Statham's conflicted ex-mercenary reluctantly drawn back into one last job to save the life of his mentor Robert De Niro by carrying out the killings over a few weeks with covert help from the British government while Clive Owen's ineffectual `featherman' tries to stop him.

Right from the start this leaves the film with a huge problem: with everyone in the movie a bastard, who exactly are we supposed to root for? The film does try to give Statham some moral qualms about what he's doing, but it never rings true and plays just as contrived as the redundant romance with Yvonne Strahovski that's randomly thrown in for a minute or two between killings to show that he really does have some feelings.Read more ›